So, I was making a presentation the other day, and someone asked a question about Bill Gates, wealth distribution and giving back.
I immediately told the audience, “I hate the phrase give back.”
You know the oft-repeated movie scene where the record player scratches to a halt at a party and everyone stops to stare at the perpetrator? The room was a little like that. I mean really… had I, or had I not just informed the crowd of my lifelong disdain for charity!?
I had not.
I do understand… even when you specify you dislike “the phrase” give back, it’s human nature to associate the phrase with a pre-programmed meaning. In this case, charity.
A Bad Label for a Good Thing
I’m actually a big fan of private charitable giving, so why then do I get hives when people refer to charity as “giving back?” Remember when you were a kid and you stole something from your brother or sister? What would any decent parent inevitably say? Give it back! Why? Because you just wrongfully took it from them.
When you tell someone to give anything back, it necessarily implies they took it (or at the very least, got it) from someone else in the first place. Otherwise, the word “back” is totally unnecessary.
When we say, “give back,” it’s devastatingly misleading about one of the most important, encouraging points in all of economics: wealth is not a fixed quantity. It’s not a pie we divide up amongst us all where one person getting a big slice means someone else must get a small slice. We create new wealth all the time!
How, you ask?
Discounting the Biggest Contribution of All
Largely by people coming up with an idea and starting a company. Microsoft is a great example. By creating a computer operating system that allowed hundreds of millions of people to work, create and learn faster and more effectively, Bill Gates and Microsoft literally created new wealth out of human ingenuity and hard work! That’s a day-to-day miracle we almost all overlook.
The only estimate I’ve ever seen of the average amount of total wealth created by a business ultimately captured by its owner was 10%. So, Bill Gates is currently worth $107 billion. That would mean he created around $1.07 trillion of value for the world at large… $963 billion of which didn’t end up with him. Dispersed amongst millions of people. Almost like a gift.
All I want is for Bill Gates and others like him (and those thinking and talking about them) to understand this: They’ve already given so much to society. For most of them, their work will be their greatest contribution to society no matter how much MORE they choose to give charitably. Asking them to “give back” implies they took something. That’s the opposite of the truth.